You can start with seeds if you want to wait 15-20 years to get your hands on some decent raw material, and then another 5-15 years of training in order to have a "bonsai" in your hands.

My advice would be to get a couple of trees that are already into training, to start with. This will give you the opportunity to play around with the trees. In the meantime, you must learn how to choose the right material from nurseries. At the same time, you should be studying and practicing how to keep the trees alive…….

Once you pass this "beginner's stage" and if you are still interested, you can start thinking about yamadori etc.

And even though you will be very tempted to apply wiring, hard pruning and other techniques on your trees, the basic and most important thing of all is to know how to keep trees in pots alive.